[jyl]

I think that in the US, we do need a focus on testing students for basic educational progress. The higher-order skills like creativity, independent thought, personal development, analytical skills, etc are important but I think should be upon a foundation of being able to read, write, do math, and other basic knowledge. I would not like to see us abandon the concept of standardized testing, but rather to improve it.

I can see that for the best students in the best schools, standardized testing isn't as valuable as they are performing far above "standard" and are trying to learn those higher-order skills. But even for those students, I think standardized testing can be useful.

For example, my daughter recently took the SAT (only in 8th grade, it was just a learning exercise for her) and also went through a battery of standardized state tests at her school. Her strong and weak scores on the state tests were a pretty fair reflection of her strengths and weaknesses, as I perceive them and as were reflected in her SAT scores. Yes, she was in the top 5 percent statewide in almost every subject - but relative to her overall standard, there were weak spots and it was helpful to see those clearly identified.

The Dept of Education is trying to start a computerized testing program where each student would be tested multiple times per year with the results easily retrieved and tracked by students and teachers. Idea being that teachers could use this to assess individual students' learning progress during the school year, not just a once-per-year snapshot of the school's performance, with streamlined administration and grading compared to traditional fill-in-the-bubble paper testing. It seems like an interesting idea.